Star Wars

Star Wars is an American epic space opera franchise, centered on a film series created by George Lucas. It depicts the adventures of various characters "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away".

The first film in the series, Star Wars (later subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope), was released on May 25, 1977 by 20th Century Fox and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon. It was followed by the similarly successful sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983); these three films constitute the original Star Wars trilogy. A prequel trilogy was later released between 1999 and 2005, which received a more mixed reaction from critics and fans, compared to the original trilogy. All seven films were nominated for or won Academy Awards, and were commercial successes, with a combined box office revenue of $4.38 billion, making Star Wars the fourth highest-grossing film series. The series has spawned an extensive media franchise—the Star Wars expanded universe—including books, television series, computer and video games, and comic books, resulting in significant development of the series's fictional universe. Star Wars also holds a Guinness World Records title for the "Most successful film merchandising franchise." In 2012, the total value of the Star Wars franchise was estimated at USD $30.7 billion, including box-office receipts as well as profits from their video games and DVD sales.

Mos Eisley

Mos Eisley is a spaceport in the fictional Star Wars universe. It first appeared in the film Star Wars. In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi (played by Alec Guinness) describes Mos Eisley, on the planet Tatooine, as a "wretched hive of scum and villainy." It is the home of the Mos Eisley Cantina and Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes.

From a distance, the spaceport looks like a haphazard collage of low-grade concrete, stone and plastoid structures that spread outward from a central power-and-water distribution plant like the spokes of a wheel. Also, at a distance, the smooth circular depressions of launch stations look like craters pockmarking the landscape.

The town is really larger than it appears, as a good portion of it lies underground. In fact, the town has a population of around 40,000 to 60,000, varying seasonally. It was built from the beginning with commerce in mind. Even the oldest of the town's buildings was designed to provide protection from Tatooine's twin suns. The buildings appear primitive from the outside and most of them actually are. The Mos Eisley Cantina was one of the spaceport's original blockhouses.

Mos Eisley Cantina

The Chalmun's Cantina (often called the Mos Eisley Cantina or the Star Wars Cantina) is a fictional bar (cantina) of the Star Wars universe located in the "pirate city" of Mos Eisley on the planet Tatooine. It is the haunt of freight pilots and other dangerous characters of various alien races and contains booths, a bar counter, and some free-standing tables, and sometimes a band of musicians named Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes.

The establishment is extremely rough in nature, and the clientele and the management give incidents of deadly violence no more than a moment's attention. Droids are not allowed inside; a droid detector near the front door alerts the management of any entering droid.

The exterior scene was initially filmed in 1976 at the little town of Ajim, which is a fishing port on the Isle of Djerba, Tunisia in North Africa. The film crew added some false frontage to the structure, giving it a more dramatic appearance. The building has seen no refurbishment since 1976. The interior set was constructed and filmed on Stage 6, Elstree Studios in London. In early 1977, Lucas added several alien close-ups at Hollywood Center Studios, because he was dissatisfied with both the make-up and the limited coverage he had from the Tunisia footage. The new material was cut into the film by Lucas' editors, including then-wife Marcia Lucas.

Star

A star is a luminous sphere of plasma held together by its own gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Other stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth during the night, appearing as a multitude of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense distance from Earth. Historically, the most prominent stars were grouped into constellations and asterisms, and the brightest stars gained proper names. Extensive catalogues of stars have been assembled by astronomers, which provide standardized star designations.

For at least a portion of its life, a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in its core, releasing energy that traverses the star's interior and then radiates into outer space. Once the hydrogen in the core of a star is nearly exhausted, almost all naturally occurring elements heavier than helium are created by stellar nucleosynthesis during the star's lifetime and, for some stars, by supernova nucleosynthesis when it explodes. Near the end of its life, a star can also contain degenerate matter. Astronomers can determine the mass, age, metallicity (chemical composition), and many other properties of a star by observing its motion through space, luminosity, and spectrum respectively. The total mass of a star is the principal determinant of its evolution and eventual fate. Other characteristics of a star, including diameter and temperature, change over its life, while the star's environment affects its rotation and movement. A plot of the temperature of many stars against their luminosities, known as a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram (H–R diagram), allows the age and evolutionary state of a star to be determined.

War

War is a state of armed conflict between societies. It is generally characterized by extreme collective aggression, destruction, and usually high mortality. The set of techniques and actions used to conduct war is known as warfare. An absence of war is usually called "peace". Total war is warfare that is not restricted to purely legitimate military targets, and can result in massive civilian or other non-combatant casualties.

While some scholars see war as a universal and ancestral aspect of human nature, others argue that it is only a result of specific socio-cultural or ecological circumstances.

In 2013 war resulted in 31,000 deaths down from 72,000 deaths in 1990. The deadliest war in history, in terms of the cumulative number of deaths since its start, is the Second World War, from 1939 to 1945, with 60–85 million deaths, followed by the Mongol conquests which was greater than 41 million. Proportionally speaking, the most destructive war in modern history is the War of the Triple Alliance, which took the lives of over 60% of Paraguay's population, according to Steven Pinker. In 2003, Richard Smalley identified war as the sixth (of ten) biggest problem facing humanity for the next fifty years. War usually results in significant deterioration of infrastructure and the ecosystem, a decrease in social spending, famine, large-scale emigration from the war zone, and often the mistreatment of prisoners of war or civilians. Another byproduct of some wars is the prevalence of propaganda by some or all parties in the conflict, and increased revenues by weapons manufacturers.